upcoming talk at Einstein Med

I’m giving a talk at Einstein Med soon as part of their EDGE symposium for senior graduate students in the Northeast. Here is the abstract:

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens track flexible motivation in rats
Animals can attribute incentive salience, or motivational value, to reward-predictive cues. This attribution manifests as a cue-approach response, known as sign-tracking, in which animals physically engage with the cue as if it were the reward itself. While sign-tracking is notoriously persistent, it is not habitual; recent studies have shown that it is sensitive to changes in outcome value and cue-reward contingencies. One example is in the form of an omission schedule, in which sign-tracking that results in lever-cue deflections is punished by reward cancellation. In this schedule, animals will continue to sign-track but will adjust their responses to avoid reward cancellation. This kind of flexibility uncovers new perspectives on a well-documented behavior, in which precise behavioral details—rather than only lever deflections—can reveal more about the neural underpinnings of motivation and learning. There are known nucleus accumbens dopamine signals that are required for the acquisition of sign-tracking, and others that are required for predictive learning. Omission learning, in which animals change their behavior but persist in sign-tracking, offers an opportunity to assess incentive and predictive aspects of the dopamine signal. To address this, we used fiber photometry in sign-tracking animals to record the fluorescence level of GRABDA2m sensors during the omission schedule in the nucleus accumbens. We show cue and reward related dopaminergic dynamics that underlie omission learning over sessions, and their resulting flexible sign-tracking structures, revealing multiple psychological mechanisms for dopamine during this single behavioral response.